Archives for February, 2010

It’s Friday! Snack on some tidbits. In the “didn’t anyone teach you to show your work in grade school?” department, we have NIWA unable to justify official temperature record, as well as the radical notion of using actual data to gauge the effectiveness of review boards in stopping unethical research. In the “open is not…

So the backstory of the truly horrific murders at the University of Alabama at Huntsville has taken an open-access turn: the perpetrator (not being a journalist, I don’t think I need to say “alleged”) got a rather dubious-looking article published in an open-access journal. Further investigation into the journal only heightens concern; while we’re not…

The journal impact factor is a sham and a crock and a delusion, let’s just take that as read. (If you don’t care to take that as read, which is a healthy and sane attitude?take no one’s word as gospel, especially not mine!?start here or perhaps here and keep going.) Using it to judge individual…

I’ve altered the tagline on this blog slightly, to reflect where it seems to be going. (I am not in control here; I am merely the author-function! Sorry, sorry, lit-crit joke.) At the same time, I’ve been thinking a lot about library collections, what’s in them and how it gets there. (I’m teaching a graduate…

I’m home sick today, and not precisely looking forward to giving my class tonight because I really do feel wiped out. Fortunately, tidbits posts are easy? Denmark ponders the future of the research library. A thoughtful read for librarians; a good skim for scientists wondering how libraries will help them in future. Congratulations to Galaxy…

I have a very lengthy post in pickle that is taking me some time to work through. Forgive me; sometimes that’s what blogging is for, though it’s tough on the posting rate. In the meantime, a small thought about improving interaction patterns between scientists and librarians, something I still very much think is necessary for…

Since early days indeed, it’s been possible to bypass journal publishers and libraries in a quest for a particular article by going directly to the author. Some publishers have even facilitated this limited variety of samizdat by offering authors a few ready-made offprints. I’ve even had publishers give me e-offprints (which to me, preprint disseminator…

Perhaps shockingly, I don’t plan to so much as try to wade through all seven-hundred-odd pages of this report on scholarly-publishing practices. It’s thorough, it’s well-documented, it’s decently-written? and based on the executive summary (itself weighing in at a hefty 20 pages), it won’t tell me a thing I don’t already know. Academia is conservative.…

Happy Groundhog’s Day Eve! Or something. Jennifer Rohn discusses how suboptimal data management makes downstream tasks such as submitting papers to journals a bit harder. The bit about proprietary image formats is particularly cringe-inducing. Why Cameron Neylon is disappointed with Nature Communications. Nature is a leader among journals; the rest of us need it to…